Give Students A `Standard' Education

It sounds vaguely familiar: Announcement of a forthcoming set of standards that will define the essential skills and knowledge all students are expected to acquire as a result of public education.

It sounds, in fact, like the national standards called for in the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act" passed two years ago by Congress.

However, this announcement comes not from national education leaders but from the Illinois Board of Education, and it may be the closest the state's schools will come to realizing the promise held out by Goals 2000. That's too bad. Not because the state effort is misguided but because the lack of national standards will make it difficult for American students to become effectively educated adults in an ever more competitive world.

The national standards effort is not dead, but it is deeply wounded. A changed political climate that values state control over federal mandates didn't help, but what has really stymied it has been an inability to reach consensus on exactly what a standard is and whose will serve as the national benchmark.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that in a nation as diverse and democratic as this one, everybody has a different opinion about what all American students should be learning.

Of four sets of standards submitted to the Department of Education in 1994--in the arts, civics, geography and history--only that for civics was generally praised. The one for American history was reviled both for what it included and what it did not. The world history standards seemed less like standards than like a curriculum guide.

But the fact that the first try produced mainly controversy is no argument against the need for standards. American students lag behind their European and Asian counterparts academically, mired in a mediocrity that will not serve them--or the country--well in the 21st Century. Intelligent national standards are part of the solution to that problem.

Given the sad failure of the national standards project, it is important that the Illinois Academic Standards Project is to issue a draft of standards for the state's students next month.

State Schools Supt. Joseph Spagnolo calls the standards a clearly focused "definition of the essential knowledge and skills the state expects children to acquire in their public education." Let us hope the state can achieve that laudable and necessary goal more readily than the nation has been able to.